A federal judge has blocked President Donald Trump’s move to deploy California National Guard troops during protests over immigration raids in Los Angeles, calling the move “illegal” and ordering the Trump administration to return the control of the California National Guard to the control of Gov. Gavin Newsom.
The judge’s order, which does not limit Trump’s use of the Marines, does not take effect until Friday at noon. The Trump administration immediately filed a notice to appeal the order.
“At this early stage of the proceedings, the Court must determine whether the President followed the congressionally mandated procedure for his actions. He did not,” U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer said in his order granting the temporary restraining order sought by Newsom. “His actions were illegal—both exceeding the scope of his statutory authority and violating the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. He must therefore return control of the California National Guard to the Governor of the State of California forthwith.”
In a statement on social media, Newsom wrote, “The court just confirmed what we all know: The military belongs on the battlefield, not on our city streets.
Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta had filed an emergency request on Tuesday to block what they called Trump and the Department of Defense’s “unnecessary” and “unlawful militarization” after Trump issued a memorandum over the weekend deploying more than 2,000 National Guard troops to Los Angeles amid the protests — over objections from Newsom and other state and local officials.
In his order, the judge pointed to protesters’ First Amendment rights and said, “just because some stray bad actors go too far does not wipe out that right for everyone. The idea that protesters can so quickly cross the line between protected conduct and ‘rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States’ is untenable and dangerous,” he wrote.
Breyer wrote that the protests in Los Angeles “fall far short” of the legal requirements of a “rebellion” to justify a federal deployment. Rebellions need to be armed, violent, organized, open, and aim to overturn a government, he wrote. The protests in California meet none of those conditions, he found.
“Plaintiffs and the citizens of Los Angeles face a greater harm from the continued unlawful militarization of their city, which not only inflames tensions with protesters, threatening increased hostilities and loss of life, but deprives the state for two months of its own use of thousands of National Guard members to fight fires, combat the fentanyl trade, and perform other critical functions,” the judge wrote in his order.
“Regardless of the outcome of this case or any other, that alone threatens serious injury to the constitutional balance of power between the federal and state governments, and it sets a dangerous precedent for future domestic military activity,” the judge wrote.
Read the fill ABC News report.
